If you’re going to run a major six-lane avenue through your most valued park, I suppose this is one way to do it: build your most beautiful median, superbly landscaped, between the directional lanes.
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This is Paseo de la Reforma – CDMX’s major east-west arterial – through Chapultepec Park. On either side, some of the most significant cultural institutions in the country and, in the case of the Anthropology Museum, in the world.
This is what Reforma looks like for the Christmas season:
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We call the red flowers poinsettas, after Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first United States Minister to Mexico, who introduced the plant into the United States in 1825. But it’s actually native to Mexico, where it is known as Flor de Noche Buena, meaning Christmas Eve Flower. According to Wikipedia:
The plant’s association with Christmas began in 16th-century Mexico, where legend tells of a girl, commonly called Pepita or Maria, who was too poor to provide a gift for the celebration of Jesus’ birthday and was inspired by an angel to gather weeds from the roadside and place them in front of the church altar. Crimson blossoms sprouted from the weeds and became beautiful poinsettias. From the 17th century, Franciscan friars in Mexico included the plants in their Christmas celebrations.
And today, on the median of Paseo de la Reforma through Chapultepec Park.
